If the hydraulic splitter could be electric, so it would not be so loud, I could see that task being meditative. Preferably if the rounds could on a raised platform, so they could just be rolled onto the thing.

Next request, the wood could stack itself somehow.

as camping is to "glamping," splitting wood is to "sprinkle wood?"

I hated cutting wood, stacking wood, splitting wood, all of it. We ran a potbelly stove in the living room when I was a kid for heat. I hated the stove too.

The only thing I don't miss is rolling a piece of piss elm over to my city living "tough" cousins after two or three pieces of oak and watching the maul just bounce off. Always funny.

Gotta agree with you there, log splitters rule. We got a little 4 ton electric one for my mom, and on some pieces it would stall. I thought, what a wimpy thing, but then hitting those pieces it wouldn't split with an axe, I realized, those were really hard to split pieces. Just growing up in the 80s we didn't have one cause my dad didn't believe in them.

Nope, splitting green wood is much more difficult than splitting dried logs, so I often cut a tree in the spring, stack the rounds, then split those rounds in the fall.

People overestimate how dry wood needs to be to burn correctly. Just have some ultra-dry kindling (seasoned for 2+ years) and you won't have any problems.

On the contrary, I know some folks who let all their wood dry too far, and it burned way too hot and ruined their stove (and almost burned their house down).

Well, it's the kind of "meditative" you get when training martial arts forms. It gets good after a few years of preparation; before that, it's not as fun as spars and way less useful than general conditioning.

Coming from a kendo background, when I had to chop firewood for a few years while living in the countryside, I generally focused on accuracy. The swing is completely different than with a sword, and getting the chop to land at the exact spot (I drew lines with a marker) tens of times in a row was very satisfying, but required a lot of conscious effort to get there. It's not trivial to land a chop at the exact spot you want, and it's also quite hard to ensure the axe travels at its fastest exactly at the moment of impact.

It can be fun, but you need to be into things like that in the first place; plus, having to do it no matter the weather and all the other things you need to do can kill all the joy instantly.

It’s also astonishing how much wood needs to be split, to heat even a moderately sized house. Depends on the climate though, I guess.

You sound like my father when someone mentions green beans